Define the Enabled property of the controls on the Form to No/False. Set
them to Yes/True only when the user has chosen an employee (check in the
After Update event of the Combo). There's nothing goofy about that. Or,
alternatively, have a form on which the only Control is a Combo to select an
employee, and use it with DoCmd.OpenForm with a WhereCondition to open the
form for Editing the Employee... use LimitToList on that original Combo, and
verify that there was a record in the Load event of the Form for editing.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access MVP

"kc-mass" connearney_AT_comcast_DOT_net wrote in message
...
Hi

I have a form designed to allow the manipulation of employee data
(assignments types, commission types and levels etc. The first thing a
user has to do is select the employee from a combo box whereupon the form
fills in with the current data. There are then 6 unbound combo boxes that
manipulate the current data by offering new selections and then in the
afterupdate event filling in fields through the application of formulas
and data transfers to the bound fields.

The problem is that when the user does not first select an employee but
instead starts with the field options in the other combos, access wants to
create a new record and once it does the employee cant' be selected util
the unwanted record is saved which I don't want to do - its trash.. I
tried intercepting the other combos in their before update, onclick and
gotfocus events but I get a strange error message of "The expression On
Got Focus you entered as the event property setting produced the following
error: Procedure declaration does not match description of event or
procedure having the same name." It then goes on to say that there may be
a missing reference or mispelled procedure name. Access created all the
procedure names and there are no missing references.

I've thought of simply hiding the other combos until they pick an employee
but that seems a little goofy.

Any ideas or smart options?

Thanks

Kevin

Any ideas